Review of fishery stock assessments set to begin

Federal officials are poised to begin a review of fishery stock assessments, a multi-step process used to estimate fish populations that then serve as the basis for catch limits and season end dates.

KATE ELIZABETH QUERAM - Wilmington StarNews

Federal officials are poised to begin a review of fishery stock assessments, a multi-step process used to estimate fish populations that then serve as the basis for catch limits and season end dates.

The review, requested this month by a bipartisan panel of U.S. senators, will focus on the data and methodology behind the assessments, which critics say may be based on faulty and incomplete data.

“(The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) may not be placing a high enough priority on conducting robust, peer-reviewed stock assessments on fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico and in the South Atlantic,” says the letter, signed by Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and sent last week to the Government Accountability Office. “This lack of empirical data forces fishery council managers ... to rely on what the councils have referred to in Congressional testimony as ‘flawed’ and incomplete science.”

Conducted by NOAA Fisheries, the stock assessments of each species consist of three data sets: the amount of fish caught each season by fishermen, the number of living fish in the ocean and biological information, including how long a species tends to live and how fast it grows.

“The data from those three categories go together into assessment models,” said Rick Methot, senior scientist for stock assessments with NOAA Fisheries. “It’s basically a mathematical model that uses the information to estimate how many fish are out there, the rate of fishing and to forecast what level of catch in the next few years would be sustainable.”

Once complete, the model and data are submitted for a review conducted by panels of independent experts who are knowledgeable about fishery issues but took no part in the stock assessments. Typically, panel members are representatives from the Center for Independent Experts, which works separately from NOAA.

Fishery experts this week said the call for a review was unsurprising but pointed out that the lack of continuous, long-term data for certain fish populations is a known issue that can be attributed largely to a perpetual shortage of federal funding for NOAA Fisheries.

“I don’t think it’s a valid concern that the data itself is questionable. What is a valid concern is that we often don’t have enough data,” said Fred Scharf, a professor of biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “Getting good, quality data in a timely way comes down to money, and most of the federal and state agencies have seen budget cuts in the past five years. Oftentimes, we know what data we need. We just can’t get it.”

The legislators, including Hagan, acknowledged that funding gap in the letter, asking the GAO to also examine the federal dollars currently spent on the assessments as well as “what resources are necessary to adequately sustain regular collection of information” going forward.

GAO officials said they had officially accepted the review but had no solid deadline or estimate of when it might be completed. Despite that ambiguity, area fishermen said they support the measure.

“Maybe we can kind of define it a little more and find exactly what we’re catching and the price of everything. That would help out the fisheries as a whole, to prove that we have fish or don’t have fish,” said Adam Donathan, a commercial fisherman based in Myrtle Grove Sound. “It needs to be done a heck of a lot better.”